Star Trek Tricorder To Be Brought To Life. British scientists are hoping to replicate the medical expertise of Star Trek's Dr "Bones" McCoy by developing a real-life version of his diagnostic tricorder. The team hopes to use a £3.4m grant to build a handheld device that can diagnose a host of conditions. The "multicorder" will house a selection of custom-made sensors designed to detect around 100 markers in blood or saliva. Project leader Professor David Cumming, from the University of Glasgow's School of Engineering, said: "Diagnostic devices such as pregnancy tests or glucose monitors, which provide rapid feedback for users, have been in use for decades. "The multicorder device we're working on will be capable of providing similarly rapid results but with the capability to diagnose a much wider range of conditions. "For countries in the developing world where access to laboratory tests can be limited, multicorder technology could mean the difference between life and death for patients.
" Future Phones May Be Able to See Through Objects. Smartphone imaging is pretty advanced these days. You can use the camera to takes videos, high-def photographs and even make panoramic images. One day you might be able to use your camera to see through walls. That capability could come from a new kind of computer chip that operates in the part of the radio spectrum, known as the terahertz range. Infrared light and shorter than those of high-frequency radio. Trickiest Spy Gadgets Ever Terahertz radiation can penetrate solids in a way similar to X rays, but because it doesn’t carry as much energy, it won't damage tissue.
Plastic. Such devices have been making their way into law enforcement and security. Set up. Electrical engineers Ali Hajimiri and Kaushik Sengupta of the California Institute of Technology have managed to bring the size down to something that could fit into a handheld device. Terahertz radiation. The chip itself is made with the same technologies used in ordinary cell phones and computers. T-Ray won’t amplify a signal. Silicon nanomembranes for fingertip electronics - Abstract - Nanotechnology. Fingertip tingle enhances a surgeon's sense of touch - tech - 10 August 2012. OUR fingers are precision instruments, but there are plenty of things they are not sensitive enough to detect. Now we can augment their talents – using wearable electronic fingertips that provide tingling feedback about whatever we touch. John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues have designed a flexible circuit that can be worn over the fingertips.
It contains layers of gold electrodes just a few hundred nanometres thick, sandwiched between layers of polyimide plastic to form a "nanomembrane". This is mounted on a finger-shaped tube of silicone rubber, allowing one side of the circuit to be in direct contact with the fingertips. On the other side, sensors can be added to measure pressure, temperature or electrical properties such as resistance. People wearing the device receive electrotactile stimulation – a tingling sensation caused by a small voltage applied to the skin. Surgical gloves are one potential application. More From New Scientist. Don't like blood tests? New microscope uses rainbow of light to image the flow of individual blood cells. Blood tests convey vital medical information, but the sight of a needle often causes anxiety and results take time.
A new device developed by a team of researchers in Israel, however, can reveal much the same information as traditional blood test in real-time, simply by shining a light through the skin. This optical instrument, no bigger than a breadbox, is able to provide high-resolution images of blood coursing through our veins without the need for harsh and short-lived fluorescent dyes. "We have invented a new optical microscope that can see individual blood cells as they flow inside our body," says Lior Golan, a graduate student in the biomedical engineering department at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, and one of the authors on a paper describing the device that is published in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express.
The researchers are also working on a second generation system with higher penetration depth. New Bedside Genetic Screen Yields Results In An Hour. The Spartan RX rapidly identifies heart attack patients who cannot activate a common antiplatelet drug. A new point-of-care system accurately screens a patient’s DNA for a single gene in an hour. The shoebox-sized device from Canadian-based Spartan Bioscience analyzes cheek swabs taken from heart attack patients for a common genetic variant, responsible for a potentially deadly reaction to the antiplatelet drug Plavix® (clopidogrel).
As recently reported in The Lancet (unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but you can read the abstract here), the bedside system dubbed the Spartan RX enabled doctors to identify every patient in the study who was a carrier of the gene, allowing doctors to provide alternative medications for treatment. The device is the fruit of a joint venture with the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, which is Canada’s largest cardiovascular center.
So it’s imperative that carriers of the genetic variant be identified and fast. Dr. Tricorder Project Seeks to Build a Mobile Sensing Device. Everyone’s favorite deus ex machina tech from Star Trek may become a reality! (OK, I take it back, replicators, the holodeck, and inverse-phase tachyon bursts routed through the forward deflector array are higher on the wishing-for totem.) The Tricorder Project seeks to create a mobile sensor suite that could be used to aid scientists and medical personnel… basically like what you see in the show. One of the most beautiful aspects of science is that while there is so much we can see and smell and feel around us, there’s an inconceivably large universe around us full of things we can’t directly observe. The Tricorder project aims to develop handheld devices that can sense a diverse array of phenomena that we can’t normally see, and intuitively visualize them so we might see temperature or magnetism or pressure as naturally as we see color.
Demo video after the jump. Senstore Wants To Make A Tricorder That Monitors The Entire Body. Senstore's founders Antony Evans and Rachel Kalmar are creating a crowd-sourced tricorder in which developers create hardware. What a great place that Singularity University is. Smart, motivated people coming together to make the world a better place through technology. This past summer a group of talented students put their heads together to tackle the Global Health grand challenge. What they came up with was a hardware platform built into a t-shirt for which developers might design sensory applications. Out of that one platform sprung a company, Senstore, which is bent on building a platform versatile enough to support hardware as diverse as apps for an operating system. I got a chance to speak with Senstore co-founders Antony Evans and Rachel Kalmar about their vision, what challenges they face in achieving it, and how their technology will impact healthcare of the future.
For the moment Senstore is focused on building single devices, such as the Live Home Free device. Noninvasive medical diagnostics using lights and lasers for medical tricorder technology. Q&A With Dr. Daniel Kraft, Director of FutureMed At Singularity University. Exponential growth in technology is par for the course at Singularity University, the future oriented institution founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis located at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley. Few fields are developing as quickly as health and medicine, which is why in May of 2011 SU launched a specialized Executive Program called FutureMed. Focused on accelerating trends such as regenerative medicine, artificial intelligence, and genomics, FutureMed gives attendees a unique perspective on the disruptive changes coming to the medical field.
FutureMed returns in 2012 from February 6th to 11th , there are still some spots to apply for and there are a few academic and student partial scholarships available. Singularity Hub spoke with Dr. Daniel Kraft, stem cell pioneer, Medical Chair at SU, and Director of FutureMed. He provides compelling insight into how Singularity University’s latest Executive Program is ready to continue shaping the medical minds of the future.
DK: Thanks. New T-ray technology could bring Star Trek like hand-held medical scanners one step closer to reality. By Tim Bredrup The dream of a Star Trek-style hand held medical scanner is now closer due to a new development in electromagnetic Terahertz (THz) wave technology, also known as T-rays. This technology, also seen in full-body security scanners, is currently able to detect very small and otherwise hidden biological phenomena such as increased blood flow around tumorous growths. Until recently, T-ray technology applications were too expensive and generated only low powers.
But researchers are now claiming their new methods of creating T-rays in a stronger, more continuous wave-like fashion will make for improved medical scanning devices that could lead to gadgets much like the “tricorder” scanner made famous by Star Trek. The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore, and Imperial College London, recently published a study in Nature Photonics stating that they were able to focus the rays into a much stronger directional beam than originally thought possible. 5 Innovation Lessons From A Breakthrough Brand Aimed At Aging Americans | Co.Design.
Most entrepreneurs embark down that path with a mix of luck, circumstance, and insight: They’re futzing with some clunky gadget, and then boom! They realize how to fix it. Or they’ve worked so long at something that they simply know how to do it better. Assaf Wand, the founder of Sabi, a line of branded, ergonomic wares for the aging which launches today, is a completely different sort of entrepreneur. Rather than intuiting some need out of the ether or working toward his big idea over a decade, he applied a mix of analytics, hustle, and hard work to finding an overlooked business opportunity. Thus, his example is a good argument that, while genius never arrives on demand, methodical discipline can conjure real innovation.
In other words, there’s hope for the rest of us who aren’t about to invent the cure for cancer. Granted, Wand had the benefit of training as a McKinsey consultant and venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Finding the Whitespace Digging in, Finding the Needs. The Biggest Opportunity For Disruption Today: Health Care Products That Work. The holiday season may be over, but the time spent with friends and family may still be fresh. In all the gatherings, I would bet you had at least one conversation about health--your diet for 2012, a friend’s pledge to exercise more, Mom’s rehab from her surgery, Dad’s long list of medications. It is impossible to escape that time of year without thinking about health; whether you are fortunate to have good health, or hoping this year will bring it. The good news is 2012 will be the year of good health--at least in the world of design and technology. Where I live in Silicon Valley, many people believe home health will be the next big boom.
The Rock Health incubator is churning out a slew of startups that will help you manage your health, the iPhone 5 is expected to launch with a built-in heart rate monitor, and sick people everywhere will begin to look at health care more as consumers than as patients. There is reason to be skeptical here. Health Redefined Opportunity for Design. Star Trek Tricorder revisited: Toward a genre of medical scanners. Public release date: 4-Jan-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Michael Bernsteinm_bernstein@acs.org 202-872-6042American Chemical Society A hand-held scanner, reminiscent of the fictional Star Trek medical Tricorder, images blood vessels through the skin and projects a map onto the skin showing nurses exactly where to insert a needle. A pocket-sized device checks blood sugar levels through the skin of people with diabetes — no pinprick or blood sample needed. Those innovations are among a new genre of medical imaging technology that's giving doctors and scientists noninvasive views into the body to diagnose and study diseases.
A report on the topic appears in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. The American Chemical Society is a non-profit organization chartered by the U.S. . [ Print | E-mail AAAS and EurekAlert! Scanadu Raises $2M For Medical Tricorder (video. Scanadu's Medical Tricorder works with your smartphone to takes vitals and diagnose disease non-invasively and at home. Star Trek fans rejoice, the Tricorder is here. Medical tech startup Scanadu has created a scanner that appears to have been inspired by those of Drs. McCoy and Crusher. The ‘Medical Tricorder’ scanner can take vitals such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and temperature, and sends them to your smartphone. The device can make the difference between a needed trip to the emergency room or a waste of time and money for conditions that don’t need treatment.
The company just raised $2 million in funding from a group of investors that includes Sebastien De Halleux, co-founder of social network game maker Playfish. De Brouwer is joined by fellow futurist Daniel Kraft, a physician-scientist who chairs the FutureMed program at Singularity University. In its early days, Scanadu is targeting the Tricorder to parents who want to monitor their children’s health better. Portable ECG technology making a splash in rural areas, potential for widespread adoption. Maestros Mediline Systems Limited, an Indian medical device maker, launched a telemedicine platform using their portable ECG device, E-UNO R-10 (not the catchiest we’ve ever heard) nearly a year ago.
In partnership with Vodafone, this device would transmit ECG’s over Vodafone’s network to a cardiologists mobile phone, initially with Blackberry support only. The cardiologist could then reply with a diagnosis and recommendation for the on-site provider. Currently, the ECG device called E-UNO R-10 is being used in rural areas around Mumbai, though they are currently looking to expand into central India as well. E-UNO R-10 can also be used for mass screening as well as remote consultation of specific patients. The device is also being marketed for use in urban areas to transmit ECG’s from an ambulance to a receiving hospital. CEO Murali Mohan explains the benefits of the device. “…the equipment needs a GPRS-enabled phone and uses a two-directional interface system in smart phones.
9 Tech Innovations For Your Health -- InformationWeek. Wondering if you're having a cardiac event or suffering from a concussion? There's an app for that: Check out these promising health-related apps, gadgets, and ideas from the Digital Health Summit. 1 of 9 The iPhone ECG is exactly what it sounds like: an electrocardiogram module that attaches to the back of an iPhone, plus an accompanying app. (There's also a new, credit card-sized module called the iCard ECG that will work with Apple's iPad and other tablets, as well with laptops and Android smartphones.) Albert loves to demonstrate the product in action by showing his own, live cardiac waveform to visitors by pressing the two metal electrodes against his chest, even through a shirt.
The iPhone ECG actually represents Albert's second foray into wireless electrocardiography. Another company Albert owns, Lifetone Technology, produces a fire alarm and alarm clock that wakes people up three ways: with an audible alarm, a flashing light, and a physical vibration from a bed-shaking module. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing. 6 Devices That Could Change the Standards of Medical Care. New T-ray Medical Scanners Look Like Ones on Star Trek. The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize may be the largest mHealth competition ever with a $10m award.
Scanadu - Medical Tricorder. Star Trek's Tricorder medical scanners could become reality after breakthrough in T-ray technology. T-rays technology could help develop Star Trek-style hand-held medical scanners. Bendy battery gives smart fabrics a charge - tech - 05 February 2012.